Publication date: June 2025

Hardback in two volumes – 246 × 156 mm – 474 pages + 576 pages

Volume I: 1885–1906

Volume II: 1907–1925

Sixty illustrations in colour

ISBN 9781843682677

A. C. Benson (1862-1925), novelist, poet (he wrote 'Land of Hope and Glory'), educationalist and Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, kept a voluminous diary for most of his life. Considered too controversial at the time, it was sealed up after his death. Only now, with the publication of this extensive selection, can his witty and acute judgements on people, institutions and issues – including Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Queen Victoria, Dean Inge, Balfour, Asquith, Eton and Cambridge – be fully appreciated. Benson paints an endlessly fascinating and often very funny picture of a public life at the heart of the Edwardian literary, educational, church and political establishments; but also of a private life riven by the pressures of unconsummated romantic attachments to young men, and by attacks of appalling depression, an illness then barely understood.

This edition has been prepared by the historians Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam and has a substantial introduction, extensive footnotes, a chronology, an index and 48 pages of photographs. It is presented as two elegant hardbacks.

In the Pepys Class
D. J. Taylor, The Times Literary Supplement

A. C. Benson enters the pantheon of great English diarists
Philip Hensher, The Spectator

This distillation reveals that Benson’s diary is one of the best of the kind… He is superior to James Lees-Milne, Harold Nicolson and Chips Channon, and on a par with Walter Scott and Virginia Woolf
Piers Brendon, The Literary Review

Some diarists are among the immortals – think Pepys and Alan Clark – and they’re the ones who give us the unforgettably acerbic, human take on their time. AC Benson, beautifully edited by Ronald Hyam and Eamon Duffy, is one of them. The author of Land of Hope and Glory has a range from the waspish to the Pooterish (bringing a glass of lemonade to Queen Victoria was an event). A joy.
Evening Standard